MORE ETYMOLOGIES.

More fun from my dictionary editing! To begin with, two pairs of homonyms that one might think had the same Greek origins but that come from words with different vowel lengths:colon ‘part of the large intestine’ goes back to Greek κόλον [kolon], but colon ‘punctuation mark (:); rhythmical unit’ is from κῶλον [kōlon] ‘limb; part of a strophe.’coma ‘cloud of gas and dust around a comet; optical aberration’ goes back to Greek κόμη [komē] ‘hair,’ but coma ‘state of unconsciousness’ derives from κῶμα [kōma] ‘deep sleep.’colporteur ‘peddler’ is straight from an identical French word, but that in turn is from Old French comporteur, someone who “comports” in the etymological sense, carrying things with them (comporter from Latin com-portare ‘carry with’); the American Heritage Dictionary says that it’s “influenced by col, neck, from the idea that peddlers carry their wares on trays suspended from straps around their necks.”
Finally, a funny-sounding word that looks like it should be Latin but in fact has no known etymology: colugo, a kind of flying lemur.
Oh, and I keep forgetting to mention that MMcM at Polyglot Vegetarian, after months of radio silence, has burst out with three new posts, Pineapple, Zapiekanki, and Bhut Jolokia; hie thee thither for more multilingual etymology than you can shake a stick at!

I was going to suggest forming a committee to assign etymologies to words which don’t have them. But then I realized that an an informal volunteer system has been doing this job all too well for centuries. (Is this the surplus of the signifier? I’ve never been able to figure it out.)

The “French eggcorn” may have become standard with that meaning in order to keep the activity of the pedlar distinct from the verb comporter ‘to include’ or se comporter ‘to behave (in a certain way)’.

κόμη is Greek for hair? presumably the cloud looks like a covering of hair-from which comet, it seems.
And the story of the name of constellation Coma Berenices is quite appealinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_Berenices

Can you tell us what the book is, Hat? Or is that a trade secret?
I’d rather not name the book, but it’s just a new edition of a dictionary that’s been around for a while. Any dictionary that has etymologies makes for an interesting read!

Interesting that the wikipedia article quoted shows no knowledge of the literary history of berenice’s hair. The poem by Callimachus about the debacle was considered important enough to become the basis for one of the few direct Latin translations (by Catulllus) of major Greek poems that we have.

the wikipedia article quoted shows no knowledge of the literary history of berenice’s hair
Some wikipedia articles are translations from each other, but many are not, or perhaps they get to be different because additional writers add different details or rewrite differently from an original article.
I checked the English, French, Spanish, Italian and German versions by looking up “Berenice’s Hair” and then the list of languages. Only the English version says that Berenice had blond hair, for instance. The other versions, although agreeing on the basic story, are all slightly different in wording or in details. Most of them tell the story at the beginning of the article, but the German version tells it towards the end. On the other hand, only the German version mentions both Callimachus and Catullus (briefly), and only the Spanish version gives a translation of Callimachus’ poem (written from the point of view of the hair).

the gruesome (cherub notwithstanding) Flagelli
It seems slightly hermaphroditic, by pictorial convention. The right breast is flat as on a man, the left breast appears to be female. It’s the left hand that holds the whip, Nietzsche notwithstanding.
Is ☧i a siglum for pinxit ?

The cherub’s left hand is not wielding the scourge in a menacing manner, just holding it like a toy while his right arm makes some sort of happy gesture (his expression seems to say “hey, look what I found!”). I don’t find him hermaphroditic: the right breast does not look to me quite like a woman’s but more like a fat baby’s, or something in between (the line looks like it has been corrected), and the left one seems to have been just forgotten by the engraver (or his apprentice working on the minor details). The background figures of constellations seem to be by another hand altogether.

I wrote about it here. Well of course you did, LH. That’s one of the great things about this place.
I was just commenting on wikipedia’s rigid devotion to a late mythographer, who seems to have introduced the confusion the wikipedia entry natters on about, without any sign that the authors know that the sources of the mythographer are extant. I don’t imagine (and certainly didn’t intend to imply) that you were unaware of the literary history.

I saw it spelled both ways. Two dictionary entries with etymology:poly- or poli-
I’d bet on the latter, mainly because it agrees with David (who knows everything), but also because it gives some supporting detail: that poliklinik existed in German in the 1820’s.

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